Mothers find camaraderie in shared experience of sons' suicides

As military grapples with alarming number of suicides, mothers find it hard to cope.

January 18, 2014|By Bill Landauer and Emily Opilo, Of The Morning Call

The shared experience isn't the only thing that binds the three women. Guilt connects them too. The three mothers believe, no matter what well-meaning friends tell them, that they could have done something. Intervened in some way. Pried the guns from their sons' fingers.

Lynda Gehris wonders why she didn't argue when her son assured her he'd be fine in Iraq. She'd even signed a release giving him permission to join the military a year early.

Anna Rodriguez is plagued by the choice she made in 2011 not to fly to Los Angeles. That would have been her last chance, she believes, to save her son's life.

Nancy Smith looks back at the sleeplessness, drinking and anxiety her son experienced when he separated from the military as an equation she never solved.

Between 2008 and 2012, their sons — three Marines from the Lehigh Valley — committed suicide. Gehris, Rodriguez and Smith are members of a club whose ranks have grown larger than ever — mothers of U.S. service members who have taken their own lives.

"Nobody knows exactly how we feel except us three," Rodriguez said. "Nancy, Lynda and I have a different, special bond because of the way our kids died."

While they and other parents grapple to understand why their service-member sons and daughters committed suicide, there is no simple enemy to blame. Classic scapegoats such as post-traumatic stress disorder have been found by military researchers in a minority of suicides. The majority of victims never served overseas.

But for reasons the military is still trying to determine, U.S. service members are taking their lives in greater numbers than they were 10 years ago. In 2012 alone, 350 servicemen and women took their own lives, a record number. Last year, for reasons no one seems to understand, the numbers dropped, the Defense Department says.

Three tragedies

On Dec. 14, 2008, Lynda Gehris said goodbye to her son, Christopher Thomas. He was driving back to the home in North Carolina he'd bought for himself and his wife, from whom he was now separated. The next night, Gehris was sitting at the computer in her Coopersburg home Christmas shopping when someone knocked.

Marines were at the door. Gehris rounded the corner and looked at them. They looked at her.

Had Christopher been in a car accident?

Nobody said anything.

Gehris screamed.

"I don't think they ever told me," she said. "I knew."

She would later find out that after Christopher arrived at the empty house in North Carolina, he opened photos on his laptop computer. Next, he wrote a letter. Finally, he went to his bedroom, took out his Glock and shot himself. He was 22 years old.

On March 1, 2011, Anna Rodriguez looked up from her work at Famous Footwear in Whitehall and saw her fiance, Michael Geiger, coming through the door. He said nothing. The look on his face told her everything.

At 6:30 that morning, Geiger and her son Nick had spoken on the phone. Twenty minutes later, Nick stood in his bathroom at Camp Pendleton and shot himself once through the heart. He was 23 years old.

Two days earlier, Rodriguez had weighed flying to California to visit Nick. She wanted to confront him about his strange behavior and his drinking. What had happened to him in Afghanistan? Maybe if he leveled with her, they could find an answer together.

But she decided not to go.

On Nov. 5, 2012, Josh Smith dead-bolted the front door of his sister's house, where he lived.

Whatever kept him up at night and caused him to put the bottle to his lips, he had kept locked within himself since his return from Afghanistan a few years earlier. He never before, however, bolted the front door.

Inside the front door, Josh had hung up his dress blue uniform and laid out his medals, his mother and sister saw upon entering with a key. Up the stairs, they were stopped by Josh's bedroom door, also locked.

He'd borrowed his father's gun to protect himself from a break-in that he feared could happen after Hurricane Sandy had knocked out power in the area.

Behind the locked door, his mother and sister found his body. He was 27 years old.

Sgt. Christopher Thomas

In the weeks and months that followed her son's death, Gehris sought answers. And feared them.

It seemed unfathomable. At Palisades High School, Chris had been smart and sensitive. IQ tests showed superior intelligence, with a special gift for language, Gehris said. She knew he could carry a tune, but she was shocked when he got the lead in "Godspell" — floored when he was good.

The terrorist attacks Sept. 11, 2001, angered him. He was 15 at the time and began a strict regimen of sit-ups and push-ups, charting his progress on a clipboard he kept in the kitchen.